Widely reported in the UK media, the alleged UK and offshore assets of former Westminster Council chief Dame Shirley Porter - a great crony and political contemporary of Margaret Thatcher - were last night frozen by the Council in its bid to recoup some £37m of penalty surcharges that were imposed on her following the 1980s "homes for votes" scandal whereby potential Tory voters were allowed to buy local authority housing stock well under commercial market rates:
For UK journalists specialising in Arab banks and financial institutions of the 1970s and 80s - who testified before Bob Morgenthau's investigative comittee that was instrumental in closing down the New York operations of BCCI - this is very welcome news as it heralds the unravelling of UK-centred money laundering scams going back some thirty years that lead directly to Ken Lay's doorstep and the subsequent massive black hole in Enron's company accounts that forced the company's bankruptcy.
BBC News reports on the Porter story thus:
Dame Shirley's 'assets frozen'
Assets worth millions of pounds said to be controlled by Dame Shirley Porter have been frozen under court orders secured by Westminster Council. Dame Shirley, the council's former leader, owes Westminster £37m in surcharges following the "homes for votes" scandal in the 1980s. The council says it has made a significant breakthrough in its attempt to recover the shortfall owed to local taxpayers. It says assets - understood to be worth about £30m - have been frozen in Guernsey, but Dame Shirley says she has no connection with the money.
She said the council's investigators had sought to involve off-shore trusts whose principal beneficiaries had no connection to the case.
The council has argued the trusts are a sham designed to disguise her control over the family fortune and therefore is money owed to the council for her financial misconduct. The council also says a further order has been granted to freeze Dame Shirley's assets alleged to be held by her son John Porter. It says this is a step forward but that getting hold of the money will depend upon successful enforcement action.
In the 1990s, the district auditor found Dame Shirley guilty of squandering millions of pounds by unlawfully selling off council flats on the cheap, simply to boost the number of Tory voters. She was cleared by the Court of Appeal in 1998, but in 2001, the House of Lords ruled she did have to pay back the money she claimed she did not have. The Tesco heiress, who now lives in Israel, was once said to be the 20th richest woman in Europe with an estimated fortune of £60m, but last year when she was ordered by a court to disclose her assets, she listed just £300,000 worth.
Westminster, which has spent about £1m pursuing the heiress, said it had decided to ask various courts to lift gagging orders which had previously prevented details of its legal actions being publicised. Colin Wilson, head of legal services at Westminster Council, said the council had been engaged in some "very intense activity" over recent months. "We have now made substantial progress. In fact we have obtained disclosure orders against 14 different companies and individuals in the UK, in Guernsey and in the British Virgin Isles, " he told BBC London. These orders require respondents to disclose information to the council about Dame Shirley's past and present wealth. "We have gained a substantial amount of information from those disclosures and in addition, we have frozen in bank accounts many millions of pounds."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3241821.stmThose who are familiar with the 20 year old saga of the "14 different companies and individuals in the UK, in Guernsey and in the British Virgin Islands" know that these relate to assets that were defrauded/embezzled from one of the principal witnesses against the murderer of a woman accomplice of London-based BCCI administrative headquarters general manager John Hillbery. The woman was an estate agent who was part of a massive property theft/money laundering scam. Since mid 1986 the UK police treated her 'disappearance' as a missing persons enquiry and the matter was widely reported in the UK press as pointing to a suspect already in jail for the brutal murders of other British women. Earlier this year a private property lawsuit judge heard evidence from the witness whose family had been hounded with death threats and acts of harassment for the last 17 years. The alleged perpetrator exposed in the UK press, although connected peripherally, is not the main suspect.
A media blackout has ensured that none of the original police evidence, which has been thoroughly investigated and independently corroborated, every reached the limelight. The background of the case shows that in today's values, some $350 million of UK property assets were laundered out of the UK via offshore tax havens and directly into the coffers of Ken Lay and his gang. These assets were subsequently recovered in a series of complex lawsuits in the US and UK. They left a huge hole in the Enron structure, which was gradually papered over with 'creative accounting' and all the tricks of the trade that have been so widely discussed in the media since the Enron crash. The private lawsuit papers have yet to be placed in the public domain and form the background to continuing police investigations into fraud, embezzelment and money laundering.
Dame Shirley Porter and her son John Porter are directly connected with the gang who masterminded this heist. The frozen assets referred to in the BBC story are connected to the $350 million haul. Some are in the form of UK property that was 'given' to witnesses who were paid off to discredit the evidence of the person testifying against the estate agent's murder and links to BCCI. Others are held in trust for partners of the actual murderer, who is a former business associate of Porter's son John. Both he and the estate agent's murderer were aware that she had alleged that the ownership documents of the $350 million portfolio had been forged in the early 1980s 'by Cherie Booth and her accomplices', pointing the finger at Booth and Blair's legal chambers colleague Lord Charles Falconer, now the UK's Lord Chancellor.
This allegation was subsequently repeated in the UK high court by an economist specialising in Middle East business, who used the pseudonym of Jonathan Becker. He was investigated in the US with cocaine money laundering offences centred on property he owned in Key West, Florida that were handled by - inter alia - the convicted ex-FBI traitor Bob Hanssen. Becker was also busted in the UK in the mid-1990s under a media blackout deal, for a series of massive embezzlements and money laundering ops. He threatened to expose Booth's/Falconer's involvement in the $350 million fraud that ended up in Lay's coffers. He died soon after of an AIDS related condition before the case could be conculded.
Becker was found to be a son of former Stasi spy chief Marcus Wolf and a UK accomplice of ex-CIA traitor Aldric Ames. Those Middle East journalists who worked in the same publishers as he did in the late 1970s and 1980s have testified both to the Morgenthau BCCI committee as well as to UK prosecutors who have handled this and related cases. Their evidence has been kept out of the public domain to protect their families.